


Lament for the Light

by abluestocking



Category: William Monk Mysteries - Anne Perry
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 17:59:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3778096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abluestocking/pseuds/abluestocking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zillah, after the curtain drops.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lament for the Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gehayi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/gifts).



i.

I find I cannot remember Killian’s voice. It is there, just beyond my reach; I remember that it was warm, that it made me smile, and that when she was happy, it danced. 

I have tried, in moments in the months since, to imagine myself in her shoes. I plead a headache and shut myself in my room; I tie my hair back, and stand in my stocking feet in front of my mirror, and try to pitch my voice as low as a man’s. I cannot do it. I sound the young girl I was six months ago, even though that girl is as dead as Killian.

We were happy so often in those days.

ii.

I thought, when I lost Killian, that nothing in the world could be worse. I was so very young.

I am the daughter of a murderess twice-damned; she killed her love, and mine. Her love died of ground glass, mine of poison. They try to keep the news from me, but there is something in me that must know the worst. I heard the cook telling the kitchen maids that Killian knew she was dying, that it was not quick. 

I wake in the night reaching out to her, aching to hold her against the dark.

iii.

Papa says I will find love again. He bites his lip when he says it, although he does not know he does; he shifts from one foot to another, his eyes huge and anxious. I am all he has now.

If Killian had been a perverse woman who killed herself, I might have been the object of pity, wronged and innocent. Hugh might have ridden to rescue me on a snorting stallion, and Mama would now be down in the kitchen berating the cooks, or in her boudoir ordering the flowers, or at the dressmakers’ to oversee my bridal fittings.

It is different when you are the daughter of a condemned murderess. 

iv. 

Light. That is what I remember most about Killian. She loved light.

Her houses were full of light and warmth, with little touches of shining brilliance. I go sometimes and walk through them, standing in the middle of quiet rooms, feeling the touch of the sun on my face. My love for her was autumn sunsets, laughter and brightness; it filled me until I thought I would explode, until I saw the world in the vibrant colors she saw every day. 

I think sometimes those colors were part of her soul.

v.

In the darkness, when the light she loved has faded and I am alone with the stillness of my heart, I wonder what I would have done if she had come to me with the truth.

I loved her. I loved the spark in her eyes when she drifted into her dreams, scarcely hearing anything I said to her; I could almost touch the grand vistas she was building in the air. I loved the way she laughed, free and unrestrained, without the calculated air of a suitor trying to impress by pretending to find his intended a great wit. I loved the way she made me feel, when she turned her shining eyes and the brilliancy of her smile on me.

She never loved me like I loved her – I accept that now; but she loved me.

vi.

I asked her barrister once, if he had known her secret. If he had, I think I would never have forgiven him for keeping silent.

He said he had not known, not until she was dead. Dead – I can say the word. They flower it about with glancing language, to protect our gentle sensibilities, but I do not feel gentle. Killian was tormented for the last weeks of her life, tortured to death, and buried in unhallowed ground as a suicide. I cannot forgive or forget that; Killian is dead, and I am the daughter of the woman who killed her.

Sometimes it feels like I killed her, with all the warmth of my love.

vii.

Sometimes when I sit in the garden, I hear a sound and look up expecting Killian to come around the corner.

No one warns you about memory. I had never lost anyone before; I did not know of the traitorous leap of the heart when you see someone’s back at a distance, who almost looks like the one you love, or hear a step on the stair. Killian’s ghost haunts my garden; Mama’s ghost haunts everywhere, morning and night.

Papa says we leave for New York next week; I wonder if ghosts are left behind so easily.

viii.

If I was brave, I think I should want to meet the man who loved her. We share a love and a loss, although his love was the longer and his loss perhaps the more profound. 

Yet it is hard to weigh these matters; he lost a present reality, and I a future dream. She loved him – he held her in his arms, he kissed her, he shared her days and her nights, her secrets and her plans. She walked with me in the sunlight – she lay with him in the moonlight. He had years of fulfilled joy, however covert, and I had months.

I am not brave.

ix.

Today I left the house on my own. If Mama had been here, I should never have been able to manage it. 

I did not go to meet Killian’s lover. I went to meet my mother’s daughters, Leda and Phemie, and the woman who loves them. I do not know what I was thinking. Martha Jackson has every reason to hate me – the girl who represents the sins of my mother, the future for which my mother killed Martha’s brother and abandoned her deformed daughters to the unforgiving streets. 

Martha did not love me, but she did not throw me out, as I perhaps deserved. She was hesitant to let me meet Leda and Phemie, and when I saw them I understood; saving their unfortunate deformity, they are as like to my mother as it is possible to be. Seeing them, I loathed my own beauty, knowing it had bought me a happy childhood and love at the expense of my mother’s first daughters. Their lives had been utterly unlike mine – and yet now they had been delivered from misery into joy, even as I had taken the opposite path.

Already they loved Martha and were loved in return, and my heart ached.

x.

There are so many things I cannot do now, so many dreams I cannot fulfill. I will never be Killian’s wife, walking with him through the warm brightness of our beautiful house, a baby in my arms and a child skipping by his side. I will never see my mother again.

When I returned from my visit to Martha, I stood for a moment in front of the library door, irresolute. Then I knocked, and was bid enter.

“Papa,” I said, looking into those tired, heartsick eyes, “I want to give Killian’s house to Martha and Leda and Phemie.”

I imagine them in the bright sun-warmth of Killian’s beautiful rooms, filling them with laughter and love. Martha will never have to work again, although she seems like the kind of woman whose hands will never be able to be still. She will love them, and they will love her, and the ghosts will lie quietly.

Money can never give Leda and Phemie back their mother, or a childhood filled with her love. Money can never give me back the women I loved, or the dreams I dreamed. 

But money can give Leda and Phemie and Martha a future – and perhaps in giving it to them, I can learn to let go of the past.

xi.

I woke in the darkness this morning gasping; the feeling of Killian’s touch still lingered in my hand and along my cheek, as if she had brushed a curl back from my brow.

In the darkness I can wonder. I love her not less, knowing her secret; the ache in my heart did not change from grieving lover to bereaved friend, when they exposed her in open court to be laughed at and mocked by people like that loathsome Sacheverall. Before they knew the truth, they accused her of being unnatural, of being a man who loved a man – what does it mean that I am a woman who loves a woman? 

I will never be Keelin Mellville’s wife, but I will always be the woman who loves her. 

xii.

We land in New York tomorrow. A blank future beckons, fresh and daunting. 

When I want to hide away from the world, I think of Leda and Phemie and Martha, warm and bright in the house that Killian built. I remember the soft light in Killian’s eyes as she dreamed castles in the air. I look at my father, so worn and stooped now, beaten-down by the wholesale destruction of his life. I must be strong for him, as Killian was strong all those years. Women are stronger than men, I think.

“Come, Papa,” I say, and take his hand.


End file.
